From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him.

In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.

The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.

Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post, is the author of critically acclaimed bestselling books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, Vietnam and the sixties, Roberto Clemente, and the 1960 Rome Olympics. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton, was part of a Post team that won the 2007 Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including in the nonfiction history category for They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin.

LA Times

Reviewed by David Lauter
on
Jun 17 2012

Yet it is the book's other narrative — the description of the kindling of Obama's ambition — that will almost certainly attract the greatest readership even though it is also the most elusive of the book's themes.

Christian Science Monitor

Reviewed by Kevin Hartnett
on
Jun 18 2012

"Barack Obama: The Story" adds considerably to our understanding of the 44th president even if it doesn’t offer a significantly better sense of exactly why Obama pursued power or precisely what he wants to do with it

USA Today

Reviewed by Bob Minzesheimer
on
Jun 14 2012

I suspect that if the president, whom Maraniss interviewed, had time to read all 641 pages...he might find the book too revealing to thank the author. Which makes it the best kind of political biography.

San Francisco Chronicle

Reviewed by Glenn Altschuler
on
Jul 02 2012

His "Barack Obama" is biography at its best. A prodigiously researched and exquisitely written multigenerational account that begins in Kenya and ...ends before Obama gets a law degree from Harvard and enters politics.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Reviewed by Tony Norman
on
Jul 01 2012

The author interviewed hundreds of people, including Mr. Obama, and has pieced together what is without a doubt the most reliable and comprehensive account to date of our 44th president's formative years.